cw: mentions of police, mentions of torture, mentions of sexual assault, institutionalization, dehumanization of autistic folks, just in general heavy stuff
The following is my take on the snippet that Myzozoa has posted that was written by Tom Clemens in The Guardian. I'm all for the thrust of the direction I think Myzozoa might be getting out of that passage, namely that the autistic community needs to start centralizing non-verbal and high support autistic folks, but I think there is (intentionally) disguised subtext steering this impulse to the wrong place that is laden in the article.
I've been hesitant to get into this thread because of the disproportionate stakes between many of the thread's participants on claims of autistic identity, as I am autistic and such constructions of identity are deeply important to me in the way I conduct myself as I go through my life and the way I relate to myself as a human being. I admit to feeling a tad vulnerable here. I do not express such hesitancy as a way to foreshorten criticism to the argument I will be presenting in this post, but rather as a way to bring awareness of the complex contextual factors that are operating in this thread and how they might affect the way I am presenting my argument in this post.
I'd argue that the conceptual construction of 'severe' autism versus 'mild' autism predicates itself on a linear construction of the autistic spectrum that deflects from the fluid traversal between different modes of autistic being that characterize the conceptualization of the autistic spectrum that employed by the autistic self-advocacy community. In short, both the conceptualization of 'severe' and 'mild' autism harm both those ascribed the label of 'mild' and those ascribed the label of 'severe'. Please do note that I do believe that there is a meaningful discrepancy to made between high support and low support autistic folks, as well as for verbal and non-verbal autistic folks. I believe that many autistic spaces fail to properly prioritize high support and non-verbal autistic voices and reify systemic harm as a result. I'm also inclined to believe very little of the rhetoric that is performed at the these 'competitive advantages of neurodiversity' sort of places, like stop gearing neurodiversity to be complacent with the logics of capitalism when that very capitalism reifies the system of institutionalization that mass imprisons and tortures a broad part of the autistic community. Nonetheless, I strongly believe Tom Clemens' tact of gearing such impulses to revolve around the conceptual apparatus of 'severity' that leads to his eventual conclusion that the autistic label has become too broad is wrong-headed and downright manipulative.
Speaking from personal experience, the divide between 'severe' autism and 'mild' autism results in a divide in the way people characterize you depending on the way they identify you from your behaviors and mannerisms. The cultural imagination of an autistic individual is that of the imagery of the meltdown, the display of violence that wrests control of the autistic individual's actions and belies their lack of an ability to maintain the intention behind their actions. Wrought from this is the belief that 'the autism is taking over', the idea that autism somehow parasitically ingrains its way into a person's identity such that it undermines their very control over their personhood. When someone refers to 'severe' autism, they are referring to this autistic individual that is supposedly characterized by their lack of personhood (let me take this opportunity to say that, contrary to the predominate cultural conception, autistic people do not have a compromised sense of personhood - I hope you can just trust me on this, as its very miserable to argue that your community belies personhood). Note that Clemens, when he refers to 'severely' autistic individual, characterizes them centrally as the sort who would be prone to lashing out and soiling themselves, the very kind of depersonalization that I am referring to. In what world would the so-called 'severely' autistic person want to be centrally presented as the sort who pisses themselves? This is not the sort of language employed by a person genuinely interested in representative justice.
This cultural perception presents the problem with the 'severe' autism label quite clearly - if one is autistic, then they don't bely complete personhood. If one belies seemingly complete personhood, they aren't really autistic. Regardless of how one is characterized, they either are culturally regarded as not a fully a person or their claims to being autistic are not only not valid but are also malicious attempts at attention grabbing, watering things down for the 'severe' autistic person. And people fluidly traverse between these categories depending on how they are socially categorized. Like, personal experience here, when I'm on the verge of a shutdown and lose the ability to coherently put forth sentences, I'm in the 'severe' category and people will call a person of 'authority' (usually either the police or whoever is in charge of the building (then the police)) to 'properly manage' me. Even after I regain the ability to speak, sometimes I am not treated as if my words mean anything and the decision regarding how to support me is wrest from my hands. When I vocal stim, I'm often a huge question mark for people and they don't know how to treat me. When I'm not belying any visible signs of autism, I'm often then treated as if I am not autistic and just a poser. It's entirely contextual, and navigating my own performativity is a necessary feature of getting through my life safely. The fixity implied by the dichotomization of 'severe' and 'mild' provides no recourse to express these contextual dynamics to people. The social basis in which these labels are ascribed just don't have the kind of secure foundation for them to be successfully employed to any autistic individual, whether or not they have been historically ascribed 'severe' more often or whether they are more often ascribed 'mild'.
Not to mention that self-advocacy efforts that also refuse to parse things in terms of 'severe' and 'mild' autism actually address problems such as subminimum wage, practices of torture such as electrocution in institutions, tackle the deeply problematic nursing home system, among other things. Whereas the major charities, beneficiaries of the non-profit industrial complex, do use language of 'severe' and 'mild' and instantiate tangible harm onto the autistic community. Take Autism Speaks, which links to the Judge Rotenburg Center (link at bottom of post) on their web portal and offers resources teaching parents to go through the five stages of grief when their child is diagnosed with autism as if they had died. If one truly wants to look at the deployment of language and which language should be used, they should look towards the way these words are used and the kinds of people who use these terms, and its clear that the people who use the terms 'severe' and 'mild' autism as well as those who worry about the overexpansiveness of the term 'autistic' are the kinds reifying the kinds of systemic harm as described above.
Note that I do have gripes with the way autistic self-advocacy still centers white voices, so I'm not completely saying that self-advocacy is perfect either, but it is certainly the preferable alternative of the two options.
Here's a link to an article offering first person accounts of the Judge Rotenburg Center, of which the largest autism charity (Autism Speaks, also known as Autism $peaks) links to, to get a sense of the non-profit industrial complex in motion and the sort of resources provided by those that refer to 'severe' autism. Please note that this article provides visceral descriptions of sexual assault and torture:
https://miscellanynews.org/2019/05/...enberg-center-tortures-its-disabled-students/
I draw a good portion of my argument from the quite frankly better, but also really long, arguments presented in the text
Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by Melanie Yergeau. It's a very academic-y book, so maybe most people wouldn't be particularly interested in reading it, but its an excellent one that provides the historical background and thoroughness that I was too lazy to provide here. Will cite that book literally anywhere, even on a Pokemon forum.
Also Tom Clemens has written for Quilette and Areospace, which alone doesn't suffice as an argument against the piece but should give a pretty good sense of where this piece is politically located (it is consistent with the logic of the alt right, stems from the idea that identity centered rhetoric is a form of 'grievance politics' (another intentionally misleading concept, but one for another day)). It's good to get a sense of the community the writer is involved in, and I hope you take from that what you will.
